Our excellent tour guides Shari and Leigh (I hope I got the spelling right) led us around the Garden’s “twenty-four acres of reclaimed land” – remember, it was once underwater before the Back Bay was filled in – and gave us any number of fun facts to know and tell.

• There’s another set of Make Way for Ducklings statues in Moscow (also sculpted by Nancy Schon), but Russian kids can’t sit on Mack and Quack and etc. So there.

• There are two redwood trees in the Public Garden, not to mention a rare Himalayan white birch.

• The Public Garden swans are not Romeo and Juliet – they’re Juliet and Julia. So all that sitting on the eggs in the fenced-off nesting area never produces any cygnets, since there’s no male to fertilize the eggs. But it seems sort of right in the first state to legalize same-sex marriage.

• The “beautiful angel monument and fountain honoring George Robert White, one of Boston’s greatest benefactors” will soon be bubbling again.

• The Friends of the Public Garden raise over $1 million every year.

Here’s their 40th Anniversary video.

We highly recommend that you stroll through the Public Garden as often as possible.